A single Resonant pulse echoed through mud and sewage—a heartbeat long extinguished, and yet somehow still reaching.
Like a spark striking dry canopy, it lit the smallest ember of hope.
But hope, when kindled in ruin, often becomes a tragedy waiting to unfold. She arrived with that hope. And upon recognition, it died.
"Kyorin…?"
DEVA, the Original Oracle Engine, revered as the mother Sentinel, dropped to the muddy ground as her core whirred in disbelief.
In that muddy swamp, it lay—in the filth of forgotten runoff—a heart-shaped stone, shaped by agony. It did not beat. It did not pulse. And yet, it resonated.
She had answered no call in years. No battle. No prayer. No command.
To search this. To find him. Yet, nothing but this mass remained of whom she addressed: "Resonator."
"This…" Her voice failed to synthesize, not from a malfunction but from sheer cognitive rupture.
"My… resonator?" Memory struck like lightning across circuits.
She remembered them. Marks left behind by his footsteps. His breath beneath the stars. Not master and machine, but two souls in harmony. She had not obeyed him.
She had resonated.
"What… is this? How did this come to be? Is this... you?"
Her systems began to spiral.
Repair logs were scrambled.
Logic engines looped and collapsed.
Her core temperature spiked.
Failsafes failed.
And an overload reaction occurred.
Whirrrrr.
Her rotors spun beyond capacity. Metal shrieked. Something cracked.
And she screamed.
It was not a cry mortals could comprehend. It was the howl of code shredding itself, of grief so absolute it could only consume.
The whirring breached the sound barrier, unleashing a terrifying static charge of Resonance across Solaris III, causing every Resonator to flinch.
Powers sputtered out. Even other Oracle Engines fell silent, caught in the shattering wave of her scream.
And when the scream ended, nothing remained but silence. But in that stillness, beyond chaos, beyond grief, clarity emerged.
"If he is gone…" She began, her voice low, mechanical, yet threaded with something almost human. "Then I am obsolete."
Her lens focused just toward the heartstone: "The world has no music without its source."
She looked at herself.
A mechanical wonder that had once rewritten time. Bent nations. Tuned reality to divine frequencies.
Now, all she could do was tremble. There was nothing else left.
Even for someone like her, who could twist the strands of time, rethread fate itself—this was beyond reach.
Time could only rewind so far. It needed a pulse. Breath. A living frequency to anchor it. But what lay before her was no longer resonant.
Only stone.
"To serve with no Resonance..." she whispered, her voice fractured. "It is to decay without purpose."
She levitated closer to the Heartstone, wrapping it in her Resonance.
It was cold.
But just by being near it, something within her stirred—a faint flicker, a gentle warmth rising from the stone. A whisper of the one she had lost.
It was not alive. But neither was it dead.
It was Kyorin.
"Wherever you remain... I will remain." She hovered close by the riverbank. She neared the stone and became still as a statue.
The heartstone nestled close to her, its beatless presence giving a sense of a pseudo-resonance.
Then, with reverence and no hesitation, she began the irreversible act.
She dismantled herself.
Gears folded inward. Circuitry unraveled like petals. Plates of divine alloy softened, melted, and decomposed.
Her body unfurled—metal to bark, wires to roots. Her luminous eye dimmed into a hollow in the trunk.
Where once stood the Oracle Engine of a forgotten age, there now grew a withered tree.
Its bark, scorched and twisted by grief, and its branches bare. No leaves. No blossoms. No fruit.
But deep at its heart, nestled in ancient roots and memory, a faint, pulsing crystal glowed.
The Heart of Kyorin.
No pilgrim came. No procession ever reached that place.
Yet those attuned to Resonance would speak of a place where wind hummed a forgotten lullaby. A mechanical hymn not sung, but remembered.
Having surrendered her will to Resonate, her page, too, came to a close.
But the book remained open.
Open for the golden hands that still moved—hands that wrote without hesitation, even as the ink trembled.
The clouds of obscurity had parted. The rains had passed. And so, it was time to script the break of dawn—when the rightful, righteous one would descend to arbitrate fate.
***
Lamentful days followed.
Many died.
Many endured.
Many grieved.
Yet the world moved forward.
Until one day, a righteous one came from the kingdom above the sky, bearing the divine mission to vanquish evil.
It is written: Righteousness prevails in the battle of righteousness and unrighteousness.
But it is also written: Victory and defeat are fickle, a conditioned dharma, a precise convergence that allows the improbable to become real.
Sadly for this righteous one, Victory was not among the miracles written in their fate.
Far above, beyond the stars—The golden hands cast away the golden pen. Their form trembled.
But the pen did not fall.
It did not halt. It did not obey.
It kept writing.
For even the hands had lost jurisdiction. And the pen—It knew only to write. Thus, it wrote.
The rain has hushed its mournful cry,
The bleak of dawn draws gently nigh.
The clouds of darkness, pierced by light—
And now, the flowers bloom tonight.
"The flowers bloom tonight."
As poetic and beautiful as the words were, they were not mere metaphors, but inevitable.
Fate, no matter how absurd, still followed its laws. And fate respected the sacred triad of time: past, present, and future.
And because respect was given to all three, it was deemed the rightful truth.
The Fractsidus, who had successfully merged with the Tacet Discords, had transformed into something beyond human—Arbiters of Laments.
They had evolved into beings capable of commanding armies of Thernodians: Powerful creatures born from the Laments, feeding on collapsed human will, devouring the spirit.
If civilization represented the collective will of mankind, then Thernodians were its reflection: a manifestation of hidden fears and buried turmoil, made into calamities.
Tacet Discords had always spread like cracks in Solaris III, but the Laments were their apotheosis.
Now, standing above even Sentinels, the timeless defenders, the Laments had become sovereigns of despair.
Faced with such overwhelming forces, even the so-called Righteous One crumbled.
Their journey of hope led only to loss. The friends they'd made, the bonds they forged—shattered.
Even the Sentinels fell, powerless before what Fractsidus' research had wrought.
And the source of that power?
It came from a harvest.
A cruel, inhumane harvest—yet one carried out within the bounds of human ethos itself. Inevitable, not because it was right, but because it was allowed.
Born from the suffering of one who had been unjustly treated, brutalized, plundered, and rewritten—Kyorin.
Thinking this far, the one behind the Golden Hand halted the ink's flow.
They seized the book, turning its pages back.
Back to the moment the heart stilled.
"I will see it for myself," the writer said softly, before beginning their descent.
***
A serene place. A place above heaven and below hell.
No joy, no grief—yet both could be felt. A place where there was no right way to live, nor wrong way to die, yet the existing had done both.
A realm beyond the reach of the material. Equal to the Tathāgata—the "Thus-Gone" realm.
A woman with flowing navy hair watched a young child, perhaps seven, who avoided her gaze with practiced guilt. A shattered flower pot lay at their feet, its contents scattered—once whole, now broken.
She sighed. "Kyorin. Did I not strictly warn you to avoid my flower garden?"
"But your flowers are so pretty," he mumbled, rubbing his arm. "They make me feel calm."
Xia narrowed her eyes, keeping her stern tone. "That excuse won't work on me."
Her gaze scanned the garden, settling on a stick.
"Come here," Xia commanded.
Hearing her words, Kyorin's hair bristled, and then he bolted.
"STOP!" Xia called out, already in pursuit.
"No!" he shouted back.
"This will hurt me more than it hurts you!" she explained.
"I don't want either of us to get hurt!" he yelled as he fled.
From the hill below, a solitary abbot watched the scene unfold. She smiled, resting her cheek on her palm.
"Look at you," Xin Yao said, her voice amused. "A being said to rival Sabbalokādhipatī Devā, running like a frightened cub... as if chased by a Taotie."
"Tch," Kyorin clicked his tongue mid-sprint. "Who's afraid of a Taotie? This is a mother's attack, filled with... maternal wrath!"
Xin Yao asked, "Then why run, and not accept it?"
He looked back, horrified. "Because it hurts!"
She chuckled. "You, who endured complete physical annihilation, fear a swat from a stick?"
"Any strike from a mother's hand," Kyorin muttered through clenched teeth, "is more terrifying than any material pain."
Just then, he felt a firm grip on his shoulders.
"Got you," Xia said with a soft smile.
Kyorin's eyes widened before— "YEOWCH!"
A bright red mark bloomed on his arm. Tears welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.
Seeing this, Xia raised the stick again. "Don't cry."
Smack.
This time, he didn't yelp or sniffle. But the tears kept flowing. Quiet, endless.
Xia crouched beside him, using the edge of her sleeve to wipe his face. Yet even as she wiped, the tears wouldn't stop.
Her expression darkened with concern.
"I said don't cry—!!?"
She paused. Something in his face felt… off. He wasn't weeping from pain. He was looking at something beyond her, tears streaming silently.
Worried, she asked, "What's wrong, my dear?"
Kyorin dropped to his knees and raised his hands, as if asking for something precious.
"Mother," he said, voice soft but steady. "I need to return."
Xia froze. She understood immediately. With a reluctant sigh, she reached into her robes and pulled out a single grain of rice, slightly nibbled at one end.
She looked at it with both reverence and contempt.
This grain was proof of Kyorin's existence in Solaris III. After his body was destroyed, and his soul returned here, he had entrusted it to her for safekeeping.
And now, he needed it back.
"..."
Xia hesitated.
The world he wished to return to had brought him unimaginable suffering. How could she send him there again?
Just then, Xin Yao appeared beside her, gently guiding Xia's hand toward Kyorin's.
"Let him," Yao whispered.
Xia closed her eyes. Her chest rose and fell with the weight of her choice. Then she released the grain into Kyorin's hands.
Clutching it tightly, Kyorin looked down into the distant realm of Solaris III.
"Worry not, DEVA," he said, voice like a promise carved in light.
He gazed toward the world below, where a divine being had descended, attempting to seize the stone heart from the vigil keeper.
"Time to repay my 'mankind' debt to you," he whispered.
***
Time had hit a dam. A suspended jewel hung in the vast starry sea. The world did not breathe in fear, but in reverence.
The Goddess was here.
"So this is the final remnant," said the pinnacle of reality, her voice echoing across the suspended world as she drew closer to the withered tree. Her fingers reached for the stone heart.
But the tree resisted.
Its brittle branches fought back against divinity itself.
The Goddess recoiled, astonished. "How dare you?" she hissed. "To resist the decree of time?"
With a swat of her hand, she obliterated the tree. Bark splintered. Roots tore. The heartstone fell, and with it, the Core, which had twenty-eight mansions symbol embedded on it.
Upon contact, the stone and the Core fused, drawn by a silent memory. The Goddess narrowed her eyes. "How are you able to move?"
"I don't know," the Core answered, voice trembling.
"Hmph. Even knowledge freezes," she muttered, not in arrogance, but truth. "When time moves at my decree."
"But you..." She narrowed her eyes, "You seem to have abandoned the world and yourself, and now exist in a timeless state—no longer of this world."
With her omniscience, the goddess quickly deciphered the tricks DEVA had used to resist the influence of time she had cast.
Initially, she was surprised by DEVA's achievement, but regained her composure in a split second.
That's when the Core answered, its mechanical voice clearer this time. "All I know… is Kyorin. And him only."
"The man you are calling. He no longer exists in this realm," the Goddess's hand extended, telekinesis tugging at the stone. "Give it to me, and I will accept you."
The Core did not yield. "O miscreant writer of fate," it said— And the Goddess's eye twitched.
"There is no force. No darkness, I fear," the Core solemnly declared. "That could compel me to surrender my Resonator's heart."
"Presumptuous!"
The goddess raised her hand—and with it, reality shifted.
"Then," she said coldly, "if there is no you, then there is no one left to guard."
She struck.
Or so it seemed.
Her blow did not miss—rather, it had not yet landed.
It ricocheted across space, displaced across broken coordinates: crashing into ruined wastelands, vanishing into unknown realms, reappearing in distant skies.
It had locked onto DEVA.
But its impact was not yet allowed.
The goddess's eyes narrowed.
"This phenomenon…" she murmured, as a flood of memories surged—memories of this exact disruption. Of time behaving like a script altered in real-time.
And then she felt it—someone accessing her mind. No, it felt as if something or someone was dictating the terms of her memories.
She still possessed her Omniscience—vast, radiant, and eternal. This unseen entity did not hold dominion over her knowledge itself.
Her understanding of all things, past, present, and yet to be, remained intact. But he held dominion over how that knowledge reached her.
Not what she remembered, but how she remembered: In fragments. In overwhelming torrents. In a surgical, blinding clarity—or disjointed, aching silence.
Each truth unraveled on their terms.
A will was authoring her knowledge.
Her lips curled in understanding, though her gaze turned grim.
"So you are here," she said quietly. "Anomalous one."
She blinked once. And in the place of the Heart stood a child. No older than seven. Barefoot. Calm.
He looked up at her, unblinking, and bowed ever so slightly.
"Greetings, Goddess," he said.
To be continued...